40 wonderful free vintage fonts

✯ Day 83 of Vintage 365 ✯

 

There is something undeniably magical about the subject of typography. A great deal of the material we've read and written - on the most ordinary of things like cereal box packaging to incredibly important documents like marriage certificates - in our lives has been printed, and thus had a typeface of one kind or another. Many fonts are fairly mundane; they're beautiful and handy workhorses, but they're not not exactly the typographic equivalent of Elizabeth Taylor's diamonds.

I'm fascinating by fonts - especially antique and vintage ones, or those modern equivalents that look as if they could have easily appeared on a billboard sixty years ago. Delving in the art of scrapbooking last autumn really stirred up my interest in typography and the world of fonts again, and as one might imagine, I went hunting for a trove of vintage fonts.

Numerous websites provided lists of free fonts that have an old school bent to them, but by far the best list I encountered was one called 40 Free Fonts Ideal For Retro And Vintage Designs on the site bluefaqs.

Don't let the word "retro" potentially put you off of checking this page - which comes complete with a colourful example of each font in use (such as the classically lovely "Diner Regular" below) – out. Though some of the 40 fonts are a bit better suited to the 60s and 70s, many of them truly look as though they really could have been plucked from the rip-roaring 20s, art deco 30s, fast paced 40s, or chicly elegant 50s. (All forty fonts are delightfully free and can be downloaded from various free font websites.)

 

I look at this collection of vintage fonts and my mind goes into creative overdrive! I'm struck by the urge to suddenly print personal stationery, create cover pages for everything I type right down to my grocery lists, knock out scrapbook page after vintage font adorned scrapbook page, send my pen pals letters in old school fonts, and escape into a typographical haze in which I forget entirely that such commonplace fonts as Times New Roman or Arial even exist.

Swing by this great list, my dears, and treat yourself to a bevy of gorgeous free vintage fonts - I can promise you that you'll come up for tons of wonderfully creative uses for oodles of them.